Some spell, anything too certain not to be trusted, but once it happens, it’s already too late and has always been too late, erasing all that came before.

Medea. She says her name aloud. Medea. Tries to remember. She reaches for a piece of her brother, a foot severed at the ankle, and presses it now to her breast, closes her eyes, tries to feel something for him, for her family, for her home, and feels nothing. Another life, someone else’s life. Cold flesh, no different from the meat of an animal. This is strange power, too much power. Hekate no more than whisperings and rumor and blind earth compared with this, spells of a mole tunneling through nothing.

5

5

The day heating already. Her grandfather most powerful of the gods, giver of light and life and destroyer, also. But were there really none who lived before? How did the world become so populated? How can there be Minyae and Egyptians and Hittites and Colchians if the sun is her grandfather? How could Hatshepsut have ruled two hundred years back, and all the pharaohs before her, longest of lines? And how could every one of these Minyae be descended from the immortals? She understands almost everything they say because they share their language with the Mycenaeans, so she knows their story of themselves, each of them descended from a god, half god and half human. Yet they look like men. They sweat at the oars as the sun heats the air, they require food and water, they piss and shit. If they do descend from gods, they’ve inherited the weakest parts of that blood. As they pull, they stare at her breasts and legs and all think the same thing, same as any man in Colchis.

What Medea believes is this: that there are no gods. There is only power, and to hold power, you have to be descended from a god. In the end, this is the same thing. When you have that power, you do become a kind of god. Hatshepsut and every pharaoh before her.

Slaying her brother, destroying her father. These are acts of a god, acts that inspire fear and form myth. Gods do what cannot be done. And a woman can become a god easily because she is not allowed anything. She can become a thing of fear. Hatshepsut wearing a beard, both woman and man. And who would cross the priestess of Hekate? Who would stop a girl from wandering in the woods at night? Just the bare fact that she wants to be in those woods is terrifying to everyone.

But here among the Minyae she must start again. Chopping her own brother into pieces and licking his blood may be enough, or she may need to do more. Every one of them must fear her or she will become a slave.